expat alkie

what i signed up 4

I thought of emailing my friend in New York, the memoirist, today, to ask her how she does it.  I mean how she deals with the lack of privacy, having to take public criticism of not only her writing but of herself.  I can't believe this is what I willingly signed up for. I've made myself so incredibly vulnerable. I chose to write about those aspects of my past that hurt the most, so I'm not expecting anyone's sympathy.

It's just, I wanted to to know how she manages to deal with all the unpleasant exposure, and still get out of bed in the morning and look the world in the eye.  I was composing this email in my head, when Jade called.  By the time I got off the phone, I had snapped out of the mood I was in.  So I never sent that email to new york, which is probably for the best because I have a habit of contacting my friend the memoirist when things are going disproportionately wrong. 

I likely would have come to the same conclusion either way.  Where will I ever find the courage to face the world as the shy author of a candid and explicit memoir? 

Friends. 

My 'Gambaru' Hangover

As of last night, the pile of translation work that I so recklessly accepted atop my other full-time job, is out of my hands.  It's done.  Now all I have to do is get that cartoon's theme song out of my head, and I'll have my life back.

But do I want my life back?

I've been scrambling to make this deadline for weeks, allowing myself virtually no free time, so now should be the moment I've been waiting for.  And yet...does anybody else get really depressed and existential after finishing a very time-consuming project??  Or is it just me. 

Of course I want my life back. It's just that, having my life back is really stressful right now. 

In a little over a month I'm flying back to New York.  It will be my first chance to visit in the States in nearly two years.  More importantly, it will be my first time back in the States as a non-drinker.  Oh yeah, and three days after my plane lands I am getting married.  And more, two days after I get married, my first book hits the shelves.

Haha...my-life-back is a totally insane place to be! I miss poocow!  Do I really?  No.  I'm more excited than anxious about the wedding, but I'm more anxious than excited about the book.  So maybe there is a balance in there somewhere.  But no matter what happens, I'll just have to deal.

That is what I do these days.

Am I THAT Self-absorbed??

"Have you ever had a day," a tired-looking T asks me after arriving home last night, "when you can't stop thinking of all the stupid things you've ever said and done throughout your whole life?"

"That's every day!!" I look up at him smiling brightly, sarcastically.  As a general rule, alcoholics tend to be rather self-obsessed creatures.  And so, breaking the cycle of self-centered, circular thinking tends to be an important goal in recovery.

Since getting sober, I feel like I've been on a never-ending quest to Just Get Over Myself Already.  Which is why it's so funny, that according to my friend Kirkus below, my book is: "self-absorbed even by the standards of this genre..."

Haaa! Ha!

My friends and I got a really big laugh out of this specific turn of phrase.  I mean, to be considered self-absorbed even for a memoirist, you just can't get more self-saturated than that.

Of course my book is self-absorbed: it was written by a drunk 25-year-old, who, throughout the majority of the writing process, was still working nights.

I've been 27 for about a month now, and honestly, 27 feels so, so much older than 25.  (In a good way of course!) And yet, as my memoir is released to the public, it looks as if my self-absorbed-25-year-old-self will be frozen in time on its pages for, if not eternity, than certainly for a while.

Amazake Wars

"So you don't drink any alcohol at all?" The mother of my two year old student is practically aghast. One advantage of teaching students in their own apartments, is that the Japanese are culturally obliged to treat any visitors to their homes with immense hospitality. This basically amounts to serving me cake or tea when I arrive, and on occasion, sending me home with department store bags filled with anything from chocolate, to rice, to sweet potatoes.

"No, I quit drinking." On the downside, Japanese offers of hospitality are quite difficult to refuse. In the five years since I arrived in Japan, I've closed my eyes and swallowed fish heads, chocolate-covered grasshoppers, intestines and all sorts of tentacles, simply because a breach of politeness would have been far more painful.

"It's 'amazake,' so it's not really sake. I believe it has less than 1% alcohol." Tomorrow, her daughter will take the 'entrance test' for pre-school. It's an event I've been helping them prepare for since last summer. It appears that the mother would like to drink with me, in order to toast to good luck.

"I'm sorry..." This makes my refusal to partake all the more troublesome.

"You would still be able to drive if you had some, because the alcohol content is so small. You really don't drink any alcohol at all?"

"Not at all."

"But you told me that you used to drink very heavily when you were younger."

"I did."

"So what happenned?"

"I stopped."

The look on her face is too perplexed for words. If we were in another part of the developed world, or more specifically, in a country where alcoholism is generally recognized as a disease, this entire dialogue would just not be happening.

"Ok, I'll make you some hot chocolate instead. You can drink hot chocolate, right?" She jokes.

"Of course I can." I accept the hot chocolate and laugh.

She continues to look puzzled. Her two-year-old meanwhile climbs up and down her mother's back, seeking attention. Though her mother is a kind, friendly and unusually open-minded woman, she is nonetheless a product of her society.

It's Not Supposed to Happen This Way...

I am supposed to be punished for acting like a bitch, not rewarded.

So I had a meeting this evening with two of my supervisors from the teaching company.  Tensions at this job escalated last week over a scheduling conflict, culminating in the angry email I sent to my boss three posts ago. 

And so I had to come in for a meeting today. I was not expecting this to be good. 

That in mind, before this meeting I had ardently prepared myself to accept responsibility for my actions (in an all too twelvesteppy sort of way...), to hold my tongue, and to absolutely-not-cry-no-matter-what.

And yet, I've just returned from what was a remarkably uneventful meeting.  I kept waiting for a bombshell to drop, but they only went over my contract again with me. I had expected to be taking a pay cut at the very least, because my teaching hours have recently been less than those specified in the contract.  And yet, they explained to me that they will continue to honor the salary stated in my contract. (And that's way more than I deserve!)

They even said that they understood my sentiments expressed in that now infamously unrestrained email, and at times it seems like they were paraphrasing me directly. It was like: "We are aware that matters X and Y are our responsibilities, not yours, and so we should..." 

The entire production was only a silly formality, perhaps to smooth things over with me.  The Japanese love smooth.

I work with small kids a lot, so I'm all about positive and negative reinforcement when it comes to discipline.  And so it worries me to get all this positive reinforcement for what was essentially bad behavior on my behalf.

Still, I am not a child.  I've been a grownup for at least a year now (see cake in upper left hand corner), so I should be fully able to learn from this situation regardless, and show more restraint next time. 

You Rememory Me?

A good part of this weekend was spent answering some questions for the media, about my experiences as a bar hostess in Japan.  Most questions were the same as the last time I was interviewed, some six months ago.  Yet I worry that, as I describe the hostess bar scene in Tokyo as I remember it, my answers lack a certain consistency.

More to the point, I feel like my attitude towards my past is changing so rapidly that I'm not sure how I should describe how I felt in those bars anymore. I'm not sure which few sentences would best describe a few years of total chaos.

And on top of all that, I have to constantly remind myself to keep my memories tightly in line with how I described the hostessing world in my book. 

After all, everyone is obsessed with "the truth," in memoir writing these days.  When I was writing my book, I was often told that my story had to be accurate enough so that no one would ever accuse of lying, yet distorted enough to mask the identity of anyone and everyone involved (especially those who could potentially sue me for slander)...whatever "truth" that amounts to.

Yet memories, I think, are just as much about present feelings as they are about past events.  So my perception of the past is changing, because my present is changing, and that's the truest thing I can tell you right now.   

Restraint of Pen, Tongue, and Email

I know nothing about any of these things. 

I got angry last night, and found myself engaged in a furious email correspondence with an administrator from one of my various English teaching gigs. It would bore you to go into the specific details of our disagreement, but suffice to say that it was over a minor matter, and I was right.  Very, very right.

But that's not the point, sadly.

"Go for a walk," I tell myself, "calm down first, before you reply to him.  If you send the angry words you are thinking right now, you're really going to regret it."

Yet I don't listen.  I can't stop typing long enough to listen to my own voice warning me.  I am too angry.  "How dare he!"  I want to stop myself, I want to make my points more respectfully, but I just can't.  It's as if I'm not myself, but instead, some swirling ball of rage with some fingers and a keyboard.

And then, moments after I click the send button, that rage lets go of me just as quickly as it picked me up.   It feels like I've fallen flat onto a hard floor.   

Just then, a tired T comes home to find a lamentable me, lying face down on our bed.

"You're not gonna believe what I just told my supervisor to do," I groan.

Little Cans, Big Promises

I took this photo of an alcohol vending machine back at the onsen by Mt. Fuji.  I hope it will hold your interest as I continue to drown in translation work. There is an end to these cartoon scripts in sight, however, so I plan to return to your regularly scheduled snarkiness sometime soon.

Go Me

Truth be told, I've had a pretty depressing holiday season.  It was the first time I spent the holidays as a sober alcoholic, and I'd be lying if I said that it didn't totally suck. Maybe the holidays have always been this depressing, I'd just never noticed it so sharply before.  And now that I like my family and don't totally blame them for everything that's ever gone wrong in my life, I have had to deal with how much I miss them sometimes.

I also turned 27 last week.  Again It felt a bit awkward, since I haven't celebrated my birthday without intoxicating myself for as long as I can remember.  Still, I managed to put my piles of translation work aside in order to hit town with my best friend and my T, and it was as fun as it could be.

I was not sad to see these holidays go.

And yet today, January 3rd 2008, right now, I finally feel like celebrating.  As special as my birth was, my 27th natal birthday suddenly feels rather insignificant when placed beside my 1st sobriety birthday on the calendar.

Anyone can be born.  Even Nazis and serial rapists have birthdays.  But a sobriety birthday, the anniversary of the day upon which I chose to take my first steps along a path that lead me out of complete and utter madness, now that is something to party about.

Excuse me while I go break out the grape juice.

Escape

T and I left Tokyo early yesterday morning with two main objectives in mind.  Our first and most important aim, was to Get Out Of Tokyo for once. The second was to see snow somewhere, and possibly play with it. (It rarely snows in Tokyo. We miss snow.)

Other than that we had no real plans.  In Japan during this time of year, travel without making any reservations  is what some people would call risky and adventurous.  Still, most would call it stupid.

I needed to do something a bit crazy though, and it is nice to have an adventure for once that doesn't involve drinking a bottle of Tequila and seeing if I don't end up in jail.

We ended up grabbing a couple of extra seats on the bus that runs from Shinjuku station to the "fujugoko" or the five lakes region that's located right at the base of Mt. Fuji.  Here is what the view looked like from the bus.

If you stop your eyes from trying to separate the snow-capped Fuji from the clouds, the whole thing sort of looks like a tidal wave.  But maybe that's just me.

After disembarking at Lake Kawaguchi, we hiked along the shore for a while before going to an ice cave that was formed by flowing lava when Fuji erupted, and bathing in natural hot springs.  The hot springs were especially kick-ass.

Here we are, waiting for a local bus to take us back to Lake Kawaguchi station. 

Consequently, said bus never came.

This was the view from the main road, as we walked 12 kilometers back to the train station, where we eventually scored some seats back to Tokyo last night.

As much as I'd yearned to leave the city that morning, I was just as content to be back to my home. here in post-civilization, where the trains and buses come when they are supposed to.

Happy New Year Minna-san, may it rock!